Getting a real piano has been one of my biggest musical joys barres by getting into synthesizers… it’s something very gratifying with just sitting and goofing around and 6 months later you realize that you’re playing stuff that was impossible for you six months ago.
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Looking at this promo video I’m tempted to get one of these for the kid as she currently prefers the iphone piano app to our real piano due to size. So can’t really comment as I’ve been sucked in!
Ha, yeah. I was thinking that it might actually make a pretty expressive midi controller.
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Just so I don’t only dunk on the Chords in this article, are there any other examples? I reviewed a Jamstik once and hated it.
I’ve watched that video the other day and think, it might be a nice controller device - but nothing more.
Every art is somthing which has to be studied, trained, and mastered. There is and will be no short-cut.
It’s not enough to want something beeing done. To make music it takes doing it, and this takes skills to do it, and those skills have to be learned first. People promising that this learning can be bypassed by useing a certain tool are deceivers, they make profit from dreamers, and they know that.
Providing early gratification for untrained people means to keep away all features demanding skills. No surprise that after a short honeymoon phase those tools get boring 
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About the thread title :
Let’s break this down. The responses here are top responses from Google.
instant-gratification music gadgets :
loaded terms – rhetoric used to influence an audience by using words and phrases with strong connotations.
always :
extreme or absolute language – an exaggerated, overblown, and probably untrue claim. It admits of no exceptions, and it seems to forbid doubt or questions.
Is the reaction to the gadget, and ad, which is highly crafted to sell ? Or is it to the idea that some method or thing could really be of assistance for people in accomplishing challenging creative tasks ?
I agree the Chorda is oversold. Examining that sort of thing is one small part of the reason i started the Crowdfunding The Good, the Bad and the Ugly thread.
But i also know that there are methods and things that help people be creative.
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I find it difficult, though, to draw a clear line - from what point onwards would something qualify as a creativity-destroying and demotivating quick-fix gadget? What about arpeggiators, chord modes on synths, song mode?
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Yes, I was thinking the same. Some gadgets were created as “quick fixes” next to a physical drum kit or a human bass player, they opened new creative ways well beyond their original purposes, and we all love them today (while still admiring drummers and bass players mastering their art).
Whether the specific gadget that motivated this thread will become a classic or not is another story.
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Yeah, skilled accordionists say the same about this “downscaled - watered - fue dummies - instant gratification - always in harmony” instrument… Go figure, it helped to create a complete new music genre that changed music forever.
Because it’s never about the “device”, it’s about the user.
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some very skilled and well established musicians make comments about samplers that overlap heavily with the criticism expressed here.
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So I have a slightly different opinion about the “instant gratification” and it’s usefulness in the path to mastery. When I first started playing with music and synths my timing was horrible and I didn’t know scales. I used a scale locked arpeggiator a lot. This was very much instant gratification. But that instant gratification is what made me come back and stick with it. I have a hard time with discipline, so I try to make my music “practice” as fun as possible, and I think an instrument that lowers the barrier for people to make music they consider enjoyable will cause them to be more likely to want to continue learning more about music. But I agree that once you are experienced that these kind of tools can feel quite limiting.
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Music from that promo video is on par with what i create, yet i have that big boy advanced “no shortcut” instruments 
I feel like in this case the hate is unwarranted. I dont remember anyone complaining about Orba, which is more or less the same concept. How does rebuilding that concept with an interface that is more familiar to a wider audience = bad + shortcut.
Info that i got from this promotional video is “hey spend 200 bucks and make sounds that wont sound immidiately bad”, not “you will be able to play like a professional in just 3 hours”. The latter is indeed bad, waste of money and a scam.
Wish them the best of luck with this one, hope they can sell a lot of these to people who were previously not into making music. And perhaps later they will come up with a midi controller thats going to appeal to me, with all that tech.
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I was speaking with another musical friend the other day about the current state of music, about how radical accessibility shouldn’t always be seen as 100% great thing. Ideally, I DO think that people should have access to begin whatever creative endeavor they wish, but I also think that there should be more vetting processes in place.
People love to compare modern music with music from the 90s and later, and for good reason; but I think the reason why music from that time is so timeless is because there was a tremendous vetting process in place, with all of its faults and benefits. Like, you HAD to be good, you had to have something fairly unique or good to offer. I just think we haven’t found a happy medium yet to balance things out.
Accessibility skyrocketed, as did hobbyists. There’s probably more hobbyists than folks that are actually serious about working professionally in the art. Hobbyists don’t have the time nor the interest to make the same sacrifices that someone who is trying to do it professionally is. Instant gratification instruments allow them to cover the most ground in the least amount of time. It makes since, I totally get it. Companies have capitalized on this radical accessibility and are making bank.
I began my musical journey in a very traditional way, the grueling summers of practicing scales and modes in every key (there’s 30, fight me!) and then doing boring ass hand curdling Hanon exercises. Hated every fkn minute of it, still hate it, but I’m thankful everyday that I did and still do it. I think whats missing is just the general respect for the art and craft of music. To respect the art enough that you understand; that to be better with it, you’ll need to make the necessary sacrifices required.
Like the instant gratification has killed apprenticeship. Apprenticeship is critical for any craft or art to maintain a certain level of understanding of its principles and fundamentals. Its a ritual passing of knowledge and understanding, each OG adding to it, furthering the next generation; to further advance the art and craft. People have the ability to completely bypass that phase now, so companies just appeal to the neo-musicians of our times.
There’s lots of information out there, but there’s actually very little knowledge. And it takes hard work and dedication to transform information into knowledge, but why bother when a chord midi pack can solve all of your chord progression problems?
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I think your point about apprenticeship is well made and I agree with that. But I think lowering the barrier of entry for music is only a benefit to humans. I feel like your above opinion is informed by a desire to make the best possible music, and to have the music you are culturally surrounded by also be the best possible. But my goal is to have the most happy people, rather than the best music. If people are happy making crap music, then having to listen to crap music is an acceptable tradeoff to me.
Also I feel like this desire towards more “good” or “high quality” music is informed by the recording industry of the 60s to early 2000s and their massive cultural dominance, and ability to throw money at marketing and production. Human’s musical experience was majority amateur for millennia.
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I see your point, but don’t misread my words. I’m all for lowering the barrier entry, but like anything it comes with some costs. My message was more about the need for balance, not a ban or anything goofy and extreme like that lol. I do want the best music possible, but I also don’t think that is has to come from the expense of people not being happy either. I also don’t see happiness as a virtue, there’s many things that would make me happy but would also be an overall detriment to my wellbeing.
I disagree about the human musical experience being majority amateur. Humans HAD to be able to play their instrument to be able to deliver and derive musical joy from it. There was no other way to play it, but to learn it.
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not sure, I agree with this…
I think there is a real danger here of gatekeeping.
more people making music, imho, is only a good thing.
doesn’t matter if they make good music or not, just that they enjoy the process.
and different tools will appeal and be enjoyed by different people, of different skills.
(and with different goals/aspirations too)
of course, gadgets like these won’t appeal to those that need or want more, but perhaps some will enjoy them, and it might even inspire them to move on to something more elaborate later.
and, then not all gadgets/tech is ‘good’…
but who gets to choose what is good? vs just not their cup of tea?
look in the cookery market…
thousands of gadgets, some useful some not…
should we ban food processors because you should learn to cut with a knife?
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I mean the every day experience of music for normal people. Normal people weren’t going to concert halls to hear professional musicians play. Most people would be experiencing music in more informal and community based interactions.
I guess I derive so much joy from even amateurish attempts at making music, I want to make that joy available for as many people as possible, and for me, making good music is not a prerequisite for experiencing musical joy. And I guess your distinction between wellness and happiness is completely foreign to me, like sure there are some things I want that don’t make me happy in the long run, but I see that as more animalistic desires for resources, like sugar.
But I totally agree that we need to work to build the systems for the people who do really want to take it seriously. I just have a lot of criticism of the way that has been done traditionally, and who those structures value.
Music theory is always far behind music practice, so that’s why it can be frustrating for ambitious musicians to confront an instrument that is heavily biased towards an existing theoretical framework (like any finite set of “accepted” chord structures, no matter how extensive)
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Having gone to GearFest and been utterly baffled by the menus and user interfaces on 80% of the synths I tried so much that they didn’t even feel like musical instruments, I’d say anything that helps simplify user interfaces and make them more user friendly is a win for the whole industry.
But totally on board with the attack on anything that forces cultural quanitisation of pitch, harmony and rhythm.